Nan Goldin's Ballad is an unforgettable document of early 80s bohemian life in New York's East Village. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice called it "a sexual taxonomy for the '80s." Writing in Roth, et. al., The Book of 101 Books, Vince Aletti declares The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to be "perhaps the most influential contemporary photo book since Diane Arbus' 1972 monograph....The work's intimacey, immediacy, and candor helped push photography into more intensely emotional territory."